Standards is a two-volume set of jazz albums released by the Keith Jarrett trio in 1983. Originally released by ECM, they have been multiply re-issued, including by Universal/Polygram. The two volumes present performances of pianist Keith Jarrett with Gary Peacock on bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums. Vol. 1 reached #14 on the Billboard Jazz Albums charts. In 2008 the two albums, along with 1983’s Changes, were collected into a boxed set, Setting Standards: New York Sessions. (more…)

Standards is a two-volume set of jazz albums released by the Keith Jarrett trio in 1983. Originally released by ECM, they have been multiply re-issued, including by Universal/Polygram. The two volumes present performances of pianist Keith Jarrett with Gary Peacock on bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums. Vol. 1 reached #14 on the Billboard Jazz Albums charts. In 2008 the two albums, along with 1983’s Changes, were collected into a boxed set, Setting Standards: New York Sessions. (more…)

Changes is a jazz album released by Keith Jarrett, Jack DeJohnette and Gary Peacock in 1984. This group subsequently became known as the “Standards Trio”. The album features improvised compositions recorded at the same sessions as the two volumes released as Standards. In 2008 the three albums were collected into a boxed set, Setting Standards: New York Sessions.

The trio originally worked together on a 1977 album headline by Peacock, Tales of Another, coming back together in 1983 when producer Manfred Eicher proposed a trio album to Jarrett. The three joined in a studio in Manhattan, New York for a 1½ day session during which they recorded enough material for three albums, the two Standards volumes and Changes without rehearsing or pre-planning the playlist. (more…)

Throughout the ’70s Keith Jarrett maintained two contrasting ensembles, one American based, the other Scandinavian. This is an album by the latter quartet, which had previously recorded the warm and winning BELONGING in 1974.

1978’s „My Song“ is aptly titled, as the six Jarrett compositions do indeed have the individual characteristics and bearing of songs. Infused with elements of folk and gospel, the music has a friendly resonance that aligns it with the likes of Horace Silver. While not as overtly soulful as Silver, the quartet’s interpretations celebrate the power of melody and harmony. Garbarek’s crystalline tone in particular flies through the rhythmic architecture like a bird over a winter landscape. (more…)

From beginning to end we are treated to a mélange of moods in this, the first effort from Keith Jarrett and his European quartet. Compositionally astute and clearly the work of steadied hands, Belonging finds each musician in fine form. Whether it is Garbarek’s punctilious doubling in the buoyant “Spiral Dance,” Danielsson’s mellifluous bass solo in “Blossom,” or Christensen’s rollicking snare in “The Windup,” everyone gets their moment in the spotlight. Jarrett’s fingerwork is, of course, superb throughout, but it is the energy underlying his playing—the very spirit of his pianism—that really seems to drive things forward. The album is zigzagged, fading adeptly from head-shaking abandon to heavy darkness from one cut to the next. Ballads make up the longest passages on Belonging and seem to turn ever inward within the confines of their own emotional borders. For the most part, sax and piano are explicitly unified, as if trekking on either side of the same divide, although sometimes they seem to look in opposite directions, as if involved in a long-running debate, unsure of whether reconciliation can be had in the throes of so much dialogue. Jarrett’s jilted approach is well suited to these down-tempo moments while the bass gently asserts its tremulous presence in the background. Garbarek’s sudden entrances weave a dense stratosphere of brassy elegance. “’Long As You Know You’re Living Yours” is pure Jarrett and provides Garbarek with plenty of space to run amok with his screeching serenade. The title cut is another ballad, this one of a different shade than the rest; not an alleyway, but a brief lapse into self-pity. As the album’s center, it also encapsulates a core theme: this music evokes a past from which one cannot escape or, more positively, simply a sense of belonging as the title would imply, the inescapability of one’s roots in place and time. Overall, this is an essential example of what ECM can do when it throws a handful of singular talents into a studio. –ecmreviews.com (more…)

‘Creation’ signals a departure from the ‘traditions’ of Keith Jarrett’s many ECM recordings of solo improvised piano. Earlier concert recordings have reflected the flow of musical ideas and inspirations as developed in the course of an evening but this album – drawn from concert recordings made in Japan, Canada and Europe in 2014 – is different.

After reviewing all the music from his 2014 performances, Keith Jarrett honed in on the most revelatory episodes from six concerts in Toronto, Tokyo, Paris and Rome and sequenced them, effectively creating a new concert, a new suite of pieces with its own inner logic and momentum. The concept opens up fresh possibilities, extending the improviser’s art to include an intuitive reassembling of material.

The resultant album is perhaps the most strongly lyrical of Jarrett’s recent solo releases, the choice of music emphasizing pieces in which there is a sense of song being born, voices striving to be heard. ‘Creation’ also offers the most up-to-the minute account of Jarrett’s uncanny capacity to construct compelling music in real-time: his melodic-harmonic imagination as an improviser and his ability to consistently find and shape new forms remain, after all these years of solo concerts, remarkable.

The album begins with music from Toronto. Paul Wells of Canadian national news magazine Maclean’s, reviewed the concert at the Roy Thomson Hall, concluding that “Jarrett matters because he possesses the improviser’s secret to greater degree than almost anyone. He can spin melody and logic, structure and surprise, richly and indefinitely.”

Keith Jarrett, an ECM recording artist since 1971, has appeared on more than seventy albums for the label. Besides ‘Creation’, ECM issues a second disc to mark the pianist’s 70th birthday (which falls on 8th May 2015), featuring him performing Samuel Barber’s Piano Concerto and Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 3. (more…)

Originally released in 1977, Bop-Be features performances by Keith Jarrett, Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden, and Paul Motian.

Bop-Be is the final album on the Impulse label by jazz pianist Keith Jarrett’s ‘American Quartet’. Originally released in 1977 it features performances by Jarrett, Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden, and Paul Motian. It is the last album recorded by the American Quartet and the final album Jarrett released on a label other than ECM.To date, Bop-Be has only ever been reissued on compact disc in Japan, packaged in a miniature replica of the original vinyl LP sleeve. However, it was included in the four-disc collection Mysteries: The Impulse Years 1975-1976. This also applies to the Jarrett album Back Hand. (more…)

Recorded in 1975 at the Köln Opera House and released the same year, this disc has, along with its revelatory music, some attendant cultural baggage that is unfair in one sense: Every pot-smoking and dazed and confused college kid – and a few of the more sophisticated ones in high school – owned this as one of the truly classic jazz records, along with Bitches Brew, Kind of Blue, Take Five, A Love Supreme, and something by Grover Washington, Jr. Such is cultural miscegenation. It also gets unfairly blamed for creating George Winston, but that’s another story. What Keith Jarrett had begun a year before on the Solo Concerts album and brought to such gorgeous flowering here was nothing short of a miracle. With all the tedium surrounding jazz-rock fusion, the complete absence on these shores of neo-trad anything, and the hopelessly angry gyrations of the avant-garde, Jarrett brought quiet and lyricism to revolutionary improvisation. Nothing on this program was considered before he sat down to play. All of the gestures, intricate droning harmonies, skittering and shimmering melodic lines, and whoops and sighs from the man are spontaneous. Although it was one continuous concert, the piece is divided into four sections, largely because it had to be divided for double LP. But from the moment Jarrett blushes his opening chords and begins meditating on harmonic invention, melodic figure construction, glissando combinations, and occasional ostinato phrasing, music changed. For some listeners it changed forever in that moment. For others it was a momentary flush of excitement, but it was change, something so sorely needed and begged for by the record-buying public. Jarrett’s intimate meditation on the inner workings of not only his pianism, but also the instrument itself and the nature of sound and how it stacks up against silence, involved listeners in its search for beauty, truth, and meaning. The concert swings with liberation from cynicism or the need to prove anything to anyone ever again. With this album, Jarrett put himself in his own league, and you can feel the inspiration coming off him in waves. This may have been the album every stoner wanted in his collection “because the chicks dug it.” Yet it speaks volumes about a musician and a music that opened up the world of jazz to so many who had been excluded, and offered the possibility – if only briefly – of a cultural, aesthetic optimism, no matter how brief that interval actually was. This is a true and lasting masterpiece of melodic, spontaneous composition and improvisation that set the standard. (more…)

Keith Jarrett and conductor-pianist Dennis Russell Davies have been friends and musical comrades for forty years. In the mid-70s the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, under Davies direction presented Jarretts chamber music. In the 90s Jarrett recorded the Mozart piano concertos with Davies and the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra. Near the beginning of their association, Jarrett invited Davies to play a composition he had written for solo piano. To listen to Ritual is akin to experiencing the core of a Jarrett solo concert. The interpreter may be different, but the lyrical expression is remarkably consistent. As Dennis Russell l Davies says: “Those who know Keith will hear him in this music. It couldnt have been written by anyone else”. (more…)

After Bremen/Lausanne, after The Köln Concert, after the epic Sun Bear Concerts, the next development in Jarrett’s solo concerts was the all-embracing music captured here. Two 1981 improvised concerts from Austria and Germany are featured, recorded respectively at the Festspielhaus Bregenz and the Herkulessaal Munich, venues noted for outstanding acoustics. While the Bregenz concert has hitherto been available as a single CD, this set marks the first appearance of the complete Munich performance on compact disc. The 3-album set includes extensive text booklet with liner notes by Keith Jarrett, an essay by Swiss critic Peter Rüedi, and poetry by Michael Krüger.

“The Bregenz/Munich concerts were Jarrett’s most brilliant live solo recordings to date; his level of inspiration is quite extraordinary, and the music covers a wider musical and emotional range than ever.”– Jarrett biographer Ian Carr